[geeks] Building a local IMAP server on OpenIndiana

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Thu, 21 Nov 2013, Mark Benson wrote:

> - I don't want to use an online IMAP server that I can't easily backup
> (fast internet hasn't come ot my house yet, we're still on 7MBit which
> is okay but far from ideal speed for doing hat kind of stuff).

7 Megabits/second?  Luxury.

I'm running dovecot here on a 4/0.7 connection; it's just fine.

    $ du -sh ~/Maildir/.
    1.5G    /home/jp/Maildir/.

Email really isn't a huge bandwidth hog, unless you're routinely
synchronizing your tree of mailboxes over the link.

Running a copy dovecot will work fine for archiving your mail, and it's
very easy to set up if you don't require access from outside your network.

     http://sptci.com/docs/openindiana/dovecot.html

How you archive it is up to you.  I archive from Mail.app at work[0] by
manually by periodically going through every folder and moving everything
older than 4 months into a folder with the same name on my archive IMAP
server.

There are plenty of automated tools that will do that for you, if your
chosen MUA won't do this automatically (or as part of a rule).  This is
also the sort of thing that's trivial to write using something like
JavaMail, if you have that particular perversion.



[0] IS have quotas on the mail server, understandably.  Some of the things
     in my email are large files that I'll need to refer to later.  So, I
     have a dovecot instance running on one of the backed-up development
     machines so that I can have access to old mail without overrunning
     quota.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "No matter how much the government controls...any
Elgin, TX         %  problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of
USA               |  freedom that remains."         --Sheldon Richman